The Social Network
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Joseph Mazzello and Rooney Mara
written by Aaron Sorkin
directed by David Finher
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
Private behavior is a relic of a time gone by.
I thought it was a great movie, so I am giving it five stars. However, I dislike the story it tells. So I would give it zero stars for the story. Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, The Social Network tells the story of the invention of Facebook by Mark Zukerberg when he was a Harvard University student in the early 2000s. It also tells us about the back-biting lawsuits that grew from the controversy surrounding Facebook’s inauguration. It kind of reminded me of how the Beatles broke up. Everybody was suing everyone else until they finally started suing themselves by accident.
Personally, I don’t use Facebook, and I don’t get it. What’s the point? I mean WHAT’S THE POINT!!?? You got E-mail. You got a telephone. You got a postal mail address. What’s the point of Facebook? Is it so you can annoy more people, faster? Is it so that you can digitize the university social experience? Hello! University is not a social experience. It is a library experience. Of course, in U.S. culture itis a social experience primarily. There’s a problem there, and not just a culture shock problem.
Facebook started as a college campus internet site for students to ... what? ... see each other’s pictures, exchange messages, find dates and sex. Today we might anticipate it will replace the telephone as the primary media of real-time communication. In the film the creators come across as geniuses, certainly, but also as extremely irritating pampered twits who drink too much and think they are entitled to their moneyed lives. It’s an existence that’s as alien to my life experience as, well, an alien from space. It’s somewhat nauseating, money. My impression is that successful ivy league business and computer people like these are akin to immature children with more money and intelligence than is good for them. But I could be wrong.
Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zukerberg as a super-fast-talking guy whose mind is on half a dozen things simultaneously, whose ideas are racing far ahead of the ability of words to express them, with absolutely no tolerance for others who are not up to his speed feels accurate. But who knows? It’s only a movie, after all.
My favorite line from the film is attributed to Napster founder Sean Parker: “Private behavior is a relic of a time gone by.” It applies to Internet social connection sites like Facebook and others, and right there is my problem with it. I believe in privacy. Lack of privacy diminishes our humanity. But Facebook users - and Americans in general - seem to think that it enhances their humanity. Morons. But the die is cast, and I think that a century from now the word “private” might disappear from the English language. First, privacy will be equated with secrecy. Second, secrecy will be demonized to the point that we stop speaking of privacy while we simultaneously canonize absolute honesty. I think absolute honesty would lead to social disaster since we are required to live in a world cluttered with people we despise. Oh, well.